This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Among the smaller duties of life, I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due. Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend: it produces more labor and more talent than twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It is the coin of genius, and it is the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice and the wisest economy.
Duty | Important | Justice | Labor | Life | Life | Man | Men | Praise | Reputation | Wealth | Talent |
The world has the wealth and resources to provide everyone the opportunity to live a decent life. We consume too much when market relationships displace the bonds of community, compassion, culture, and place. We consume too much when consumption becomes an end in itself and makes us lose affection and reverence for the natural world.
Compassion | Culture | Life | Life | Opportunity | Reverence | Wealth | World |
Jim Webb, formally James Henry Webb, Jr.
The wealth of a society isn't measured at the top, but at the bottom
Experience: The wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Acquaintance | Experience | Folly | Wisdom | Old |
The folly of intelligent people, clear-headed and narrow-visioned, has precipitated many catastrophes.
Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore they imagine there is nothing it cannot buy... In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool.
Character | Good | Men | Nothing | Understanding | Wealth | Value |
It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth and wisdom.
The man who has been born into a position of wealth comes to look upon it as something without which he could no more live than he could live without air; he guards it as he does his very life; and so he is generally a lover of order, prudent and economical. But the man who has been born into a poor position looks upon it as the natural one, and if by any chance he comes in for a fortune, he regards it as a superfluity, something to be enjoyed or wasted, because, if it comes to an end, he can get on just as well as before, with one anxiety the less.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Chance | Fortune | Life | Life | Looks | Man | Order | Position | Wealth |
The real measure of our wealth is our worth if we lost our money.